'I tried to encourage them, texting: 'Keep going. You’re doing well.' Then the signal died'
he question flashed up on my screen early on the morning of August 26th: “Do we have to get into the water?” The message was from an Afghan television host – I’ll call him Rahim – who was outside Kabul airport. I’ve used a pseudonym here, but Rahim’s real name is known all over Afghanistan: he’s the Afghan equivalent of Jon Stewart and people in the street regularly ask him for selfies.
I tried to respond to all the messages, but I could act only as an information clearing-house, directing people to various countries’ resettlement programmes, which were already overwhelmed. I wasn’t really helping anyone.reporter I had met while running a training course a few years earlier.
By that point it wasn’t clear that even getting Karimi’s family on the list would be enough. The crowd of desperate people camping out at Kabul airport had turned into a frenzied riot. At least ten people, including children, had already been trampled to death. To get someone out you needed not just a country willing to put them on an evacuation flight, but a way to get them through that deadly crush and into the airport.
It was around 2.30am in Georgia when I told Bonnard the news, deflated. There would be other evacuation flights, but getting into the airport was probably only going to get harder. The next evening, the Karimi family decided to try again. This time, I could track their progress on my screen using the’s instructions, the family was supposed to go round the back of a compound to reach an entrance to the airport known as Abbey Gate.
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